4 landmark cottages on Russian Hill restored the right way

Above: Four cottages built in 1907 have been completely restored and now are on the market for $4 million and more. Below: The cottages in the 1300 block of Filbert Street on Russian Hill’s west slope, as they appeared before the painstaking restoration.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Strange enough that the steep, 1300 block of Filbert Street contains a delicate garden of flowering ground cover amid the stocky mansions and apartment compounds built before 1930.

It’s stranger still to learn that the greenery visible over a front fence doubles as the roof of a car elevator that descends 20 feet to an eight-space underground garage — a garage tucked underneath four cottages built in 1907.

But that’s the nature of change on Russian Hill and in other wealthy San Francisco neighborhoods, the ones seemingly now immune to the passage of time. New layers are still added, but nothing happens quickly. And all the delays add to the costs of living in a city where nothing comes cheap.

Here, the outcome was the rebirth of four formerly dilapidated relics in a manner that is architecturally deft, at prices ranging from $4 million to $4.5 million.

The quartet dates to the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake, when the task at hand was to house as many people as quickly as nails could be pounded into freshly cut wood. No community process, no Planning Commission. Certainly no time-consuming rounds of environmental reviews.

William Bush, who owned two narrow lots side by side, joined in the frenzy by building four two-story cottages lined up perpendicular to the street. Workforce housing, to use today’s lingo, each with 900 square feet of space.

The cottages at 1338 Filbert St. on the west slope of Russian Hill, as they appeared before a painstaking restoration completed in 2017.

Photo: Frank Deras

Those are the cottages, rebuilt and reimagined, now being marketed as landmarks “combining their rich history and architectural detail with modern finishes and floorplans.”

The outer walls are mostly historic — redwood siding painted a creamy white and topped by hipped roofs covered in plain asphalt shingles. Each has a stairway leading up from the mews, and in the back the four older structures are connected by a zinc-clad addition painted a discreet gray. The add-on is 30 feet tall and 16 feet wide, enough to add space to each cottage but not call attention to itself.

“I think of the addition as a neutral backdrop, as if it’s a curtain on the stage with dancers in front,” said architect Jerome Buttrick. “Once we cleaned up and painted the cottages, we knew they were going to shine.”

The most fastidious attention went to the brick walkway leading from the sidewalk to the back of the lot. Loose sand fills the space between the bricks, just as when longtime owner Marian Hartwell spiffed things up in the 1950s. The plantings along it include plum trees and heirloom roses, selected by landscape architect Marta Fry in keeping with Hartwell’s midcentury tastes. In the middle of a dense city, you feel as though you’re on a shaded country path.

When a developer, during the dot-com boom, proposed enlarging the quartet, neighbors responded with a successful campaign to have the cottages and the walkway declared a landmark in 2003. The structures were praised as examples of “vernacular post-earthquake period architecture.” Hartwell, who taught at the California School of Fine Arts and then ran a studio in the cottages, was extolled as a vital link to local art movements before and after World War II.

Exit developer.

In 2007, David Low and Dominique Lahaussois purchased the quartet with an eye to a simple fix and, oh yes, the addition of a parking space or two. Three years of planning reviews followed, and an inexorable evolution of the project to include a full underground garage reached by an enclosed vertical platform.

“We were at the limits of that technology, but it worked,” Buttrick said. As for the sedum-covered roof, “it’s meant to recall the original sloping garden.”

4 landmark cottages on Russian Hill restored the right way

1of9The living room in one of the cottages built more than a centu
ry ago that have been many years in the exquisite remaking.Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

2of9The kitchen in one of the four cottages built in 1907 along the 1300 block of Filbert Street on Russian Hill in San Francisco that are now on the market.Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

3of9The front porch of one of the four cottages built in 1907 on the west slope of Russian Hill that have been completely restored and are now on the market.Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

4of9The view from the living room of one of the four cottages built in 1907 along the 1300 block of Filbert Street that are now on the market.Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

5of9Four cottages built in1907 have been completely restored are now on the market, along the 1300 block of Filbert St., in San Francisco, Ca., as seen on Tuesday July 18, 2017.Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

6of9Four cottages built in 1907 along the 1300 block of Filbert Street have been completely restored are now on the market.Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

7of9Four cottages built in 1907 along the 1300 block of Filbert Street have been completely restored and are now on the market.Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

8of9The underground parking of the completely restored four cottages that were built in 1907 along the 1300 block of Filbert Street and are now on the market.Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

9of9The cottages at 1338 Filbert St. on the west slope of Russian Hill as they appeared before a painstaking restoration completed in 2017.Photo: Frank Deras

End of story? Of course not. Once planners and politicians had signed off, neighbors billing themselves as Friends of the Landmark Filbert Street Cottages filed the inevitable lawsuit. There were allegations of procedural errors involving everything from building permits to the lack of a full environmental review.

Spite lawsuits of this sort are common in California: The main goal seems to be to gum up the works, slow things down.

Litigation delayed work until 2014. Then the state Court of Appeal put an end to it once and for all. Once construction started, there was a nine-month stretch when the cottages were suspended in air, perched on steel columns while the concrete garage was inserted underneath.

Now, the cottages are exquisite. They also have the slightly unreal ambiance of history restored to a luster far beyond the days when Bush, a butcher by trade, was scavenging salvaged windows and doors for the cottages. Or the days when Hartwell had the quartet chopped into 10 apartments, affordable lodging for students and other free spirits.

The block remains steep. The buildings along it remain an odd mix of the sort that today would never be allowed. You wouldn’t know anything is different — unless you happen to be there when the garden starts to rise and the parking lift appears.

John King is The San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic, taking stock of everything from Salesforce Tower to public spaces and homeless navigation centers. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of two books on San Francisco architecture, King joined The Chronicle in 1992 and covered City Hall before creating his current post in 2001. He spent the spring of 2018 as a Mellon Fellow in Urban Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.